I'm not, the NoFreeLunchTheorum tells us that no search method can be a significant improvement over all possible problems. That's certainly true of searching the web. It's a mathematically provable, logical necessity that there'll be GoogleHoles

While I'm as skeptical of MS' marketing machine as much as the mext man, there are some very interesting points rolling off [Steven http://slate.msn.com/id/2085668/ Steven Johnson's article], and it's a shame he doesn't address them in much more detail.

Top results are for shops

People are tending to rely on Google rather than old-school, book/publication research

I think these are fair points, but they paint only half the picture. Point for point:

Any automated search engine will sort according to some criteria, and therefore will attract "search engine optimisation" techniques that people are willing to pay for in order to promote their business. I think this has more impact than people simply linking to shops whenevr they mention a product.

Any search engine entails learning how to use the engine, as any non-biased search engine in a technological domain will encouner a greater number of technological pages than anything else. Searching for "apple" returns Apple computers. Searching for "apple trees" does not. Words can be omitted as a vague kind of filter too, although I think this could be made "fuzzier" too.

Quite possibly - indeed I find myself looking only on Google these days, but that's generally because I don't have the time or resources to seek out further sources. I think the main group this is probably aimed at is journalism and media, rather than either individuals or academia, which seem to maintain a healthy infrastructure of both off- and on-line research. However, this point: "Assuming this practice continues, and assuming that Google continues to grow in influence, we may find ourselves in a world where, if you want to get an idea into circulation, you're better off publishing a PDF file on the Web than landing a book deal" could be seen as a good thing, too.

In relation to the first point, there is an interesting observation on [Steven http://stevenberlinjohnson.com/ Steven Johnson's blog] that people are posting links to sites in the form of comments in his old blog posts, with comments like "good site", and the URL they want to promote as the user name's link. Could this be a form of "pagerank piggy-backing"? (or "pagey-backing"?)

There's still a lot of interesting stuff that lies ahead for search engines, especially once we start to get distributed "spidering" that allows individual users to index whatever content they find, a process touched upon by but http://www.stumbleupon.com/ but that could be extended a whole lot further - by indexing the information you yourself can see, it starts to become possible to at least keep pointers of the "dark web" - all the content hidden behind databases, CGI and log-ins. It also makes cataloguing and linking of any documents possible, rather than just whatever Google writes an interface for.